SOURCE: Kemp, Peter. “Evident Absurdity.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4621 (25 October 1991): 20.

In the following review, Kemp evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of Judge on Trial, noting that the novel “takes you into an atmosphere of choking oppressiveness.”

An acrid smell wafts from the pages of Judge on Trial—that of gas. Two characters mentioned in the book gas themselves. A disturbed young man tries to do the same for himself and his mistress. Her husband, about to preside over the trial of someone accused of gassing an old woman and her granddaughter, is a Jew who spent his wartime years in the shadow of the gas chambers.

As might be expected from this, the novel's subject is suffocation. Like all of Ivan Klíma's fiction, it takes you into an atmosphere of choking oppressiveness. This is something Klíma himself was transported into at an early age: when a...